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7.9 excellent
I think most kids love zoos... but when we grow up we human animals start to take a different view. If one has even a small amount of empathy, it's hard not to feel depressed seeing animals enclosed by walls and fences. Sometimes the walls are curved, or camouflaged to blend into the cage environment, but they're barriers all the same. Did you know that The Tower of London housed lions and tigers for hundreds of years and used to charge visitors three half-pence to see them? (Or you could get in for free if you brought along a cat or dog to donate as lion-chow.) Luckily most modern zoos focus more on conservation and protection of endangered animals. I like this trend. But zoos can still be depressing places.
In Zulu's Zoo, from Little Games Company, you play as the permanently smirking Zulu, a young Texan woman who has been given the chance of a lifetime: clean up the local zoo in a bid to win a $1,000,000 state grant. The grant money will be given to the best zoo in the state. You're up against three other zoos in this kid-friendly hidden object game where the gameplay is all about the animals.
Even though the zoo has been inexplicably named after Zulu, she starts as a lowly zookeeper apprentice without a clue in the world... and has to clean up animal pavilions, count animals, and feed them. As the blonde gains more experience (in the form of magic stars) she will be offered zookeeper tests which - if passed - will advance her rank. It's not quite as easy as it sounds!
As a hidden object game, most gameplay involves some variation of searching a crowded scene for specific objects. These tasks are given to you by various zoo personnel. In Zulu's Zoo, more often than not you'll be looking for animals. If you have a large yard or a woody area next to your own home, you know just how well animals like to hide! It's the same here. At the bottom of your screen will be a list of animals to find. When you locate them within the scene, clicking on them removes them and crosses them off of your list. Find them all and it's on to the next pavilion. There are a lot of variations, however, so things are kept fairly interesting.
You might be asked to take pictures of certain animals using a viewfinder (that only shows you a portion of the screen at once). You might be asked to find all the fish in a large and trash-filled aquarium. (Somebody threw a doughnut into the aquarium. Oh brother. If I was Zulu my first order would be to stop selling doughnuts near the aquarium. Or maybe put of signs reminding visitors not to throw doughnuts or other items into the fish pavilion. Is a zoo with a doughnut floating in a fish tank going to win a million dollar prize? No!) You might be asked to feed all the animals in a pavilion... a nifty puzzle that involves selecting from various types of food and then clicking on an animal that eats that kind of meal, until every animal is fed. Every scene has a lot of animation in it, and sometimes you'll have to wait for an animal to pop out from hiding before you can click on it. That more than anything makes this game fun.
(Oddly enough, you can't feed fish to the bald eagle. You have to feed it meat. I take my grandmother to the Mississippi River every winter to see the bald eagles fishing, and I can assure Little Games Company that they can eat fish!)
If you can't find an animal or need a hint, you can always click on one of your magical stars. They'll show you where a missing animal is hiding. And believe me, some of these animals are so well-hidden that on more than one screen you'll need a handful of stars to complete your task. There are plenty of stars hidden in each scene, and amusingly one is usually hidden behind an animation of some sort. It might be under a bird's wing, or in a clam's shell, for example.
Between hidden object scenes you're treated to amusing animal factoids. Did you know that you can count the rings in a frog's bones to tell how old it is? (Just like you can a tree.) I didn't know that... and now I'm more scared of frogs than ever!
You also get plenty of magic stars as a reward for finishing each scene. That's good, because you'll need those stars to complete your zookeeper tests to advance in rank and gain access to new hidden-object-filled pavilions. Stars count as Zulu's zoo experience points and it costs 40 stars just to take the zookeeper test. (If you've wasted all your stars on hints you can always play a few minigames to get some more.) Plonk down 50 stars for an automatic passing grade on the test. Yes, that's expensive! I found the tests interesting, but the interface was kind of confusing on a few of the questions. Some items you could mouse over and see a descriptive tooltip. Other items had no tooltips at all. If you're really stumped you can use one of your "cheats" to answer part of the test question. You get one "cheat" per completion of a hidden object scene.
Zulu's Zoo certainly isn't a masterpiece of graphic beauty, but the 30 busy hidden object scenes with plenty of animals moving around and background animations makes this a perfect game for kids. Especially as kids are much more likely to enjoy the zoo theme. The game uses 1024x768 resolution screens, which is the bare minimum for hidden object games these days, if you ask me, and it's available on both Mac and Windows computers. (Yes, there are Mac hidden object games!) You'll hear plenty of animal sounds and if you squeeze your eyes shut as tightly as you can and use your imagination, I bet right now you can hear the corny background music. Overall, the fun presentation and slightly unusual zoo tasks gave me a lot more enjoyment than I was expecting from this title.